Christendom College is offering a free online course called “Journey Through the Great Works of Literature.”
The five-lecture series will examine the greatest literature of Western civilization, “from Homer to The Hobbit.”
Christendom’s website touted the course as an antidote to “cancel culture”:
“Today, the greatest literary works of Western civilization are often cancelled or suppressed. However, these books need to be read and understood in order to communicate important truths about ourselves and he world around us.”
The course focuses on the virtues of literary heroes, and how they reflect the values of he past and the present. Dr. Ben Reinhard, an Assistant Professor of English Language and Literature at Christendom College, where he teaches courses in classical and medieval literature, will teach the course. Reinhard received his Ph.D. from the Medieval Institute at the University of Notre Dame, writing his dissertation on Old English religious literature.
Participants will study:
- The glory and limitations of Achilles and how Virgil critiques and refines the Homeric hero.
- How the character of the knight developed and endured into the modern world.
- The Enlightenment’s rejection of Christianity and the advent of the “anti-hero.”
- Tolkien’s creation of a new kind of hero allowed him to advance traditional ideas about the hero in a secularized and skeptical modern age.
To register, click here.
